It's OK

The good news is: The interview went well :)The bad news is: I won't hear anything until towards the end of next week :/ ..and then it will be a call to second interview with the chief architect.

I was interviewed by the guy whose job I'm replacing. He's moving off into another job in the same company, but he's been charged with finding a replacement for his role. Without wanting to sound too cliché'd, we got on really well and both agreed on approaches to things. Hurrah :)

He did ask about my lack of professional qualifications - I pointed out that being an Architect/Designer was always my ambition and I didn't want to be pidgeonholed as 'the sysadmin' or 'the programmer' or 'the whatever'. I am, of course, happy to take courses to prove my ability wherever necessary.

I also cheekily pointed out why I convinced my present company NOT to use Messagelabs for email due to their policy of following the braindead RFC that states that if you are able to open a TCP connection to a mailserver you must retry the same server rather than fail over and try the next highest priority MX record... I said that the reason for this was that we were in the business of delivering mail, not TCP connections. He was very interested in this as it 'closed a loop' for him. I (with tongue firmly in cheek) apologised if I'd caused him any problems ;)